Telecommunication networks usually consist of various proprietary hardware appliances. Deploying a new network service requires consideration of both the target hardware network appliances and many other related hardware network appliance, for example how to integrate and deploy these appliances. Moreover, hardware lifecycles are becoming shorter as innovation accelerates, which also result in reduce of the return on investment of deploying new services and further constraining innovation in the area of telecommunication network.
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) described in Non Patent Literature (NPL) 1 aims to address the above problems by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types into industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage. It deploys network functions in software that can run on a range of industry standard server hardware.
Telecommunication networks are known for the HA, which is supported by highly customized proprietary legacy hardware appliances. While in the environment of NFV, software appliances (also known as virtual machines) are used instead of customized proprietary hardware appliances. Therefore, how to enhance HA of software appliances (VM) in NFV becomes a hot topic.
Software appliance, such as virtual machines, can be executed by a group or cluster of host computing devices. In the current data center architecture, the host computing devices are enterprise servers. While under the resource disaggregation architecture, the host computing devices may refer to the computing resource pool (also known as Central Processing Unit (CPU) pool).
VMware has implemented the feature of failure detection and resetting VM at virtual machine monitor (VMM) layer in vSphere described in NPL 4. FIG. 1 is an explanatory diagram depicting system architecture of HA at VMM layer described in NPL 4.
According to its architecture illustrated in FIG. 1, there is an HA-agent in each node (refers an enterprise server). Among the nodes, there is a single selected master node and the rest of the nodes are all slave nodes. The HA-agent in the master node is in charge of monitoring the availability of local VMs and communicates with other slave HA-agents to make sure the availability of the slave node. So that when an HA-VM fails, another available node will be selected and then the HA-VM will be launched on the selected node.
According the maximum configuration manual described in NPL 5, it shows that the VMM layer HA solution suffers from scalability. The maximum supported number of nodes is limited to 32. When HA option is enabled, in the 32 nodes deployment environment, there are maximum 64 HA-VM can be supported in each node. While when HA is disabled, in the 32 nodes deployment environment, there are maximum 100 VM can be supported in each node.